Upcoming presentations

Wednesday, June 6, 1:00 Supermarket suicide and restaurant roulette. Escondido Senior Center. OASIS – see their website http://www.oasisnet.org.

Friday, June 15, 1:00 Emerging infectious diseases and safe travel guidelines, Temecula Higher Education Learning Center. Osher – see their website http://www.csusm.edu/el/olli.

Wednesday, June 20, 2:00 All about Shingrix, the new shingles vaccine, Escondido Senior Center http://www.oasisnet.org

Tuesday, June 26, 9:30 a.m. How wars changed medicine, Oceanside Senior Center, 455 Country Club Lane. Osher – see their website http://www.csusm.edu/el/olli.

Friday, June 29, 1:00 p.m. Emerging infectious diseases and safe travel guidelines, Carlsbad Library Learning Center. Osher – see their website http://www.csusm.edu/el/olli.

In the news

Trans fats are going away – finally!

Trans fats are vegetable oils that have been treated to keep them from becoming rancid. When they are used in baked goods they prolong their shelf life. That’s good for food manufacturers but bad for the heart. Trans fats raise LDL (bad) cholesterol, lower the levels of HDL (good) cholesterol, make blood more likely to clot in vessels of the heart and brain and increase inflammation, which plays a large role in heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis and other diseases.

By June 18 – only days away – the FDA has ruled that food manufacturers must remove trans fats from processed foods. Health experts predict that this will prevent several thousand heart attacks per year.

If you are a label reader you have probably seen some nutrition facts labels that state that the trans fat content of the item is zero. Government folks aren’t very good at math: “zero trans fat” on a food label means that it can have up to 0.5 grams of trans fat. Maybe that helps to explain why the U.S. is a financial mess – the people that make the rules can’t do simple math!

Lifestyle

Dieting Guidelines

Your mother was right! Eating slowly is better for you but not for the reasons I heard when I was a kid: “Don’t eat so fast! You’ll choke on your food.” “It’ll make you sick..” Well, that second part was right but the sickness would take years, even decades to develop.

When we eat fast we eat more. That’s because it takes about 15 or 20 minutes for our hard-wired appetite-control mechanism to let us know that we’ve eaten enough. It was once thought that this was a simple mechanism brought into play by a hormone called cholecystokinin that was released when the stomach was full. We should have known! Nothing is really that simple in matters of biology. Scientists now know that there are several mechanisms, some regulated by hormone-like chemicals, that control appetite.

Some of this came to light after lots of people had a part of the stomach removed to lose weight. They didn’t get as hungry as they should have when portion sizes were limited to something about the size of a golf ball. The part of the stomach that had been removed contained cells that produced one of the hunger-causing hormones.

The bottom line: follow Mom’s advice and eat slowly. You’ll end up eating less, especially if your meals consist largely of fiber-rich vegetables.